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Global Economy Approaches Soft Landing, but Risks Remain
71–80 of 122 posts
Re: Global Economy Approaches Soft Landing, but Risks Remain
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the flip side, tech was booming during Covid when a ton of people in retail, restaurants were affected. All industries and all sectors can’t always be booming without there being a perpetual bubble. We have trouble finding good engineers to hire, so I’m skeptical when I hear people having trouble finding engineering jobs. My assumption (could be wrong) is a lot of people having trouble getting work haven’t adjuste…
What do you consider "unrealistically high", because I find that hard to apply to what I'm seeing. For example, I was recently contacted about a bay area principal engineer spot for 150-190k. To give some context, a fast food place near my house has signs in the window offering 160k+ for managers. Maybe fast food is paying exceptionally well these days, but I have my doubts.
Does the bay area role also come with equity? I doubt that's true for the restaurant manager.
Re: Global Economy Approaches Soft Landing, but Risks Remain
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
We’ve been telling people for years that a STEM degree is a free ticket to the middle class and studying humanities is a total dead-end. It wouldn’t be that surprising for there to be too many programmers (in some sense; if you ask management there will never be enough as long as we have any negotiating leverage). This is a broader problem than the recent COVID-induced troubles.
We've been telling people for years that a STEM degree is a fast track to a six figure income. And that's been mostly true. But now people are going to find out that a STEM degree is going to place them firmly in the real middle class, not the, "I make $240k a year and live in the Bay Area I'm middle class just like you" middle class. Possible we might see some real class solidarity if those being displaced can get o…
An STEM degree was a fast track to a desk job that might have allowed for “middle class” living, whatever that means.
But electrician/plumber/nursing/other physically demanding jobs have always been the other, and more resilient, option. But they’re not desk jobs.
Re: Global Economy Approaches Soft Landing, but Risks Remain
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Labor and housing. The only places in economics where supply/demand is never a factor. Such a convenient way for the universe to arrange itself for the people in power who want immigration huh?
Immigration is a reality, it always has been. There is no broad support for cutting off legal immigration, it's uncontrolled immigration that most people object to. The US has always had huge levels of immigration and probably always will.
High skill immigration into sectors that are highly productive is fundamentally a different animal than low skill immigration into low paying sectors.
The low pay is itself a signal they don't require any more manpower. They can do little productive work with what they currently have and thus can't meaningfully reward who they employ currently, let alone someone new.
These two types of immigration are intentionally conflated.
Re: Global Economy Approaches Soft Landing, but Risks Remain
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the flip side, tech was booming during Covid when a ton of people in retail, restaurants were affected. All industries and all sectors can’t always be booming without there being a perpetual bubble. We have trouble finding good engineers to hire, so I’m skeptical when I hear people having trouble finding engineering jobs. My assumption (could be wrong) is a lot of people having trouble getting work haven’t adjuste…
> We have trouble finding good engineers to hire > unrealistically high salaries That's expected if you don't want to pay the salaries your candidates want. Admitting to not being able to find qualified workers is admitting fundamental incompetence as an employer and as a business. Hiring and retaining workers is the foundation of any business that employs people. Haven't it struck you that maybe you are unrealistic…
This.
Of course the comment is not just paradoxal, it's contradictory.
Behind a basically bias mind, blinded even by the irresistible desire to basically pay little, bank fat profits, and do nothing.
It's an amazing time to be alive. To see how broader access to Information turning against those who used to think the asymmetry would last forever.
Re: Global Economy Approaches Soft Landing, but Risks Remain
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Things are different now. The reality is that probably close to 80-90% of self-described software engineers face permnanet unemployment as they will be replaced by low paid "prompt engineers", likey from India. It's already happening and it's happening at scale. The top 10% will see enourmous income gains as they will be the only people left who actually know what they are doing and how to correct mistakes that can't…
People have been saying this for decades about tech specifically, and for hundreds of years about every major technological innovation.
Yes, and it happens and destroys entire cities, many which never recover.
Re: Global Economy Approaches Soft Landing, but Risks Remain
#77Soft landing except for us in tech who have been unemployed for months or years
Sorry to be critical but if you are in tech and have been unemployed for years (especially if those overlap with covid) then you are most certainly doing something wrong and need some guidance. Even now the situation is bad, but not that bad that it should take you more than a couple of months to land some kind of tech job that can pay the bills.
Re: Global Economy Approaches Soft Landing, but Risks Remain
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Things are different now. The reality is that probably close to 80-90% of self-described software engineers face permnanet unemployment as they will be replaced by low paid "prompt engineers", likey from India. It's already happening and it's happening at scale. The top 10% will see enourmous income gains as they will be the only people left who actually know what they are doing and how to correct mistakes that can't…
That's a very weird market you're describing. Can't the top 10% do "prompt engineering" themselves? What's the point of creating a layer of incompetent human programmers in the middle?
That's the normal market reaction to some kind of automation.
The most competent few can do a lot more, and command a higher salary, while the masses discover they are out of jobs.
After that, people discover that the product is now cheaper, so they may or may not buy more of it, maybe or maybe not increasing the total they spend, and maybe or maybe not creating more jobs for the mass that was displaced earlier.
Anyway, believing that LLM-programming is going to have that impact is just ridiculous.
Re: Global Economy Approaches Soft Landing, but Risks Remain
#79IMF economic forecasts are of little value, as everyone should have learned from 2008. Let's see what the IMF forecast in 2007... https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2015/09/28/04/53/sores1... forecast: "World growth to slow in 2008, but still expected to remain solid at 4¾ percent " reality (Fed report 2013): "From peak to trough, US gross domestic product fell by 4.3 percent, making this the deepest recession sinc…
> If climate scientists made forecasts that were this ridiculously off base in the wrong direction, the whole field would be laughed out of the room. How is it that the neoclassical econometric modelers at the IMF aren't? It's more like astrology than science. I have to say, this made me chuckle. Climate scientists have gone from warning us that we're entering an ice age, to warning us that the globe is warming too m…
That's nonsense - you're conflating the discovery of the main drivers behind the ice age cycles that began at the end of the Pliocene (~100,000 years per cycle over ~2 million years) with the discovery of the effects of human fossil fuel combustion.
Yes, we're past the historical warm maximum period of this cycle and we'd be steadily (and very slowly) heading into another ice age over the next 70,000 years or so - but again, fossil fuel combustion and the injection of mass amounts of fossil CO2 into the atmosphere have radically altered that trajectory. This is not hard to understand, unless you're deliberately trying not to.
Re: Global Economy Approaches Soft Landing, but Risks Remain
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
We’ve been telling people for years that a STEM degree is a free ticket to the middle class and studying humanities is a total dead-end. It wouldn’t be that surprising for there to be too many programmers (in some sense; if you ask management there will never be enough as long as we have any negotiating leverage). This is a broader problem than the recent COVID-induced troubles.
We've been telling people for years that a STEM degree is a fast track to a six figure income. And that's been mostly true. But now people are going to find out that a STEM degree is going to place them firmly in the real middle class, not the, "I make $240k a year and live in the Bay Area I'm middle class just like you" middle class. Possible we might see some real class solidarity if those being displaced can get o…
I should have not used the term middle-class because it invites definition based arguments.
I meant the Marxist petit-bourgeoisie, which is one of the (multiple, sometimes incompatible) definitions of the middle class. If by middle class you just mean people who have around median income or so, I’d quibble about whether that is any more “real,” but who cares? It is just a definition.
Anyway, I think people generally expect something like that petit-bourgeoisie status from their engineering degrees. It is the expectation that our skills will be in demand enough that we can tell management to get bent if they ask us to do something unethical or dangerous; this is a dramatically different position in the labor market, but it requires rare and in demand skills.